Automating public health through tokenized incentives
Ribbon enables crowdfunding for public healthcare programs, then distributes proceeds as incentives to patients and healthcare practitioners to encourage healthier lifestyles and quality healthcare delivery.
Revolutionizing healthcare incentives with blockchain
Ribbon Blockchain is a healthcare incentives platform that aims to modify behaviour through
rewardable tasks. Ribbon channels donated, pledged or sponsored funding to health and
wellness related behavioral incentives.
Funding is sent directly to patients, community health workers and healthcare practitioners;
where the funding is used for preventative care, adherence to medication and therapy,
quality of care delivery and overall population health outcomes.
Our Incentives are distributed in DAI which is a US Dollar stable coin to allow for a more
stable source of income in countries with volatile currencies such as Zimbabwe or Venezuela.
Ecosystem users
Ribbon provides value to every player within the public healthcare ecosystem.
Patients
We offer a personal data broking service to all individuals that empowers them to retain sovereign ownership of their health records and data while earning DAI at every instance where their datasets are traded or monetized in the data economy.
Healthcare Practitioners
We offer a care quality and performance monitoring system that enables physicians and practitioners to track their ratings while earning incentives for continuous improvements in job performance.
Community Health Workers
We onboard skilled and previously unemployed Community Health Workers as self-employed Care Partners, to function as intermediaries and patient advocates that process patient-practitioner medical interactions and prescription data.
Pharmaceuticals
We offer big Pharmaceuticals access to public health patient-practitioner insights such as drug usage, brand performance, adherence, toxicity, patient-reported outcomes, etc; to help them in planning and business optimization.
Governments
Our Platform is positioned as a low cost automated system to help Governments improve health systems efficiency, manage patients, practitioners, prescriptions, inventory and to provide accurate reporting and data analytics across the board.
How Ribbon works
The Ribbon ecosystem has 4 main features to bring together donors, patients, practitioners and governements.
Crowdfunded Incentives
We tokenize crowdfunded healthcare incentives from:
- Donors
- Government Health Departments
- Corporate Health & Wellness programs
- Pharmaceuticals
- NGOs
- Aid agencies
Patient Incentives
We channel Incentivizes to Patients for:
- Screening and Testing
- Initiating treatment
- Adherence to medicines/therapy
- Behaviour change
- Surveys
Practitioner Incentives
We channel Incentivizes to healthcare practitioners for:
- Quality healthcare delivery
- Quantity healthcare delivery
- Performance
- Patient interactions
Analytics
We generate analytics reports on:
- Real-time analytics
- Healthcare analytics
- Performance
- Predictions
- Insights
Core ecosystem services
Ribbon offers a number of key technologies across the healthcare incentives ecosystem.
Incentives
We offer tokenized incentives (paid in DAI) for any private or public health and wellness program or institution that needs to encourage preventative healthcare, disease screening and testing, quality of care delivery, adherence to therapy, disease suppression and behaviour change.
Interactions
We utilized skilled and trained community health workers as Care Partners to digitize all
healthcare interactions between patients and healthcare practitioners to create data
provenance that provides context and meaning to health data.
Ratings
Our Patient Experience of Care (PEC) rating system enables patients to rate their healthcare
experience to help identify areas for continuous improvement on the quality of healthcare
delivery at both healthcare practitioner and healthcare institution level.
Records
Our records system ensures the capturing of accurate health records and associated
prescription data to create a longitudinal health record for every patient.
Analytics
The Ribbon system generates Real-Time Data Analytics which allow healthcare institutions, practitioners, businesses and decision makers to get health insights, draw conclusions immediately and react to healthcare-related issues.
Ribbon is built on the latest web3 technology
The Ribbon ecosystem is built on a number of the latest blockchain technologies and primitives. All logic, value transfer and smart contracts run on the Ethereum blockchain.
Our whole architecture and code base is open source! Developer documentation and a wiki are coming soon. Check out our github below.
Ethereum Smart Contracts
All value transfer within the ribbon system is governed by audited smart contracts.
DAI Stable Coin For Payments
Payments made to patients and practitioners are done in the Dai stable coin.
DAO For Fund Governance
Allocation of funding to specific healthcare programs and other ecosystem wide configurations are governed by a decentralized autonomous organization.
USSD Technology For Feature Phones
Users in developing countries are not excluded from interacting with the platform through our USSD wallet interface that is built in house.
Roadmap
Ribbon is currently building out a proof of concept Dapp.
2015 to 2017
Concept research and development as a non profit adherence initiative, in collaboration with SA Department of Health, Mylan Pharmaceuticals and a prominent health data analytics firm.
2018
Q1
Ribbon Blockchain incorporated as a privately limited for profit company with a public health blockchain use case.
Q3
Private sector & Big Pharmaceuticals engagement with MOUs. White paper development.
Q2
Development of Incentives demo app and website, and health public sector stakeholder engagements.
Q4
Incentives App MVP launch. Stakeholder exhibit workshops. South Africa National Blockchain Alliance Board membership.
2019
Q1
Initial incentives POC.
Q3
App Iteration. Onboarding patients and practitioners. Incentives Design. Partnership with R2C.
Q2
Proof Of concept Token design. Partnership engagement. Consensys Social Impart Grant.
Q4
Dai-to-Fiat cash off-ramps. International Fiat Donation portal.
2020
Q1
USSD token wallets. DAO program managers
Q3
xDAI integration. Wallet Point of Sale and Inventory management system.
Q2
Extra system functionality, Patient Queuing, push notifications More advanced token modeling.
Q4
Real-time Data Analytics. Begin planning creation of data marketplace.
Core team
Ribbon has a experienced, interdisciplinary team who is perfectly positioned to realise the potential of healthcare incentives.
Gugulethu Nyathi
Co Founder and COO
Chris Maree
Co Founder and CTO
Mpadi Makgalo
Co Founder and CEO
Allan Katongole
Software Engineer
Onuwa Nnachi Isaac
Software Engineer
Veronica Coutts
Project Manager
Neo Moselekwa
Social Media Manager
Advisory team
Ribbon has an experienced advisory team which is perfectly positioned to realise the potential of healthcare incentives.
Mathias Forbord
Back End Architecture
Ben Onuoha
Blockchain Strategy
Joshua Cassidy
Blockchain Development
Simon Emanuel Schmid
User Experience
Dr Brenda Kubheka
Risk, Bioethics & Health Law
Daniel Makoni
Data Science & Engineering
Ecosystem partners
Ribbon has an extensive network of partners and supporting organizations from all around the world.
Frequently asked questions
Some common FAQs spanning incentives, tokens and ecosystem questions. For more information please reach out to us on our email provided below.
Ribbon Incentives are made up of public health programmes that encourage and reward you for living healthier, adhering to taking your medicine and for disease suppression.
Do a national public health check, screening, assessments and other tasks at an accredited DoH Clinic, Hospital, Wellness Centre, Ribbon Wellness Network pharmacy and Doctors.
Incentive Tokens are sent directly to your mobile phone and you can access them via a USSD code on any mobile network. USSD codes to be provided.
Incentive Tokens reflect upon completion of the health interaction, when the Care Partner captures the procedure. The Incentives app has a time limit of 2minutes maximum after interaction is completed and your balance should reflect within 15 minutes maximum.
You can spend your tokens on any partner stores affiliated to the Ribbon Network or withdraw peer to peer from friends, other patients and health workers with fiat cash on hand. We have affiliated Spazas tuck shops and supermarkets located at Clinics and Hospitals that will be part of the Network to withdraw tokens in cash.
Incentivized checks, tests and tasks include:
- Informed Consent declaration - 2 DAI
- Surveys - 1 DAI
- Sign Non-smoker's declaration - 1 DAI
- Blood pressure - 1 DAI
- Blood glucose - 2 DAI
- Cholesterol - 1 DAI
- Weight assessment - 1 DAI
- TB - 2 DAI
- Pap smear - 2 DAI
- Mammogram - 2 DAI
- Prostate inspection - 2 DAI
- HIV test - 3 DAI for prick test & 5 DAI for blood draw
- Colonoscopy - 2 DAI
- Glaucoma screening - 1 DAI
- Flu vaccination - 1 DAI
- Blood donation - 5 DAI
- Adherence scoring - 5 DAI / milestone (excluding health check earnings)
Practitioners earn 10-15% depending on quality care ratings, for all Incentivized checks, tests and tasks that they presided over:
- Informed Consent declaration - 0.2 to 0.3 DAI
- Surveys - 0.1 to 0.15 DAI
- Sign Non-smoker's declaration - 0.1 to 0.15 DAI
- Blood pressure - 0.1 to 0.15 DAI
- Blood glucose - 0.2 to 0.3 DAI
- Cholesterol - 0.1 to 0.15 DAI
- Weight assessment - 0.1 to 0.15 DAI
- TB - 0.2 to 0.3 DAI
- Pap smear - 0.2 to 0.3 DAI
- Mammogram - 0.2 to 0.3 DAI
- Prostate inspection - 0.2 to 0.3 DAI
- HIV test - 0.45 DAI for prick test & 0.75 DAI for blood draw
- Colonoscopy - 0.2 to 0.3 DAI
- Glaucoma screening - 0.1 to 0.15 DAI
- Flu vaccination - 0.1 to 0.15 DAI
- Blood Donation - 0.5 to 0.75 DAI
- Adherence scoring - 0.5 to 0.75 DAI / milestone (excluding health check earnings)
Ribbon Care Partners earn 15% of all Incentivized checks, tests and tasks that they presided over:
- Informed Consent declaration - 0.3 DAI
- Surveys - 0.15 DAI
- Sign Non-smoker's declaration - 0.15 DAI
- Blood pressure - 0.15 DAI
- Blood glucose - 0.3 DAI
- Cholesterol - 0.15 DAI
- Weight assessment - 0.15 DAI
- TB - 0.3 DAI
- Pap smear - 0.3 DAI
- Mammogram - 0.3 DAI
- Prostate inspection - 0.3 DAI
- HIV test - 0.45 DAI for prick test & 0.75 DAI for blood draw
- Colonoscopy - 0.3 DAI
- Glaucoma screening - 0.1 DAI
- Flu vaccination - 0.15 DAI
- Flu vaccination - 0.15 DAI
- Blood Donation - 0.75 DAI
- Adherence scoring - 0.75 DAI / milestone (excluding health check earnings)
Children can earn tokens from birth, and these are paid into the mother’s mobile phone number. Children above 12 years of age can earn tokens and receive them in their own mobile phone numbers, which have to be affiliated with a family member’s mobile number on the system.
The name Ribbon blockchain is inspired by disease ribbons such as the pink ribbon for cancer, red for HIV and so on. Our knowledge of disease is that some are related and therefore should be understood in themselves individually and per relationships to be able to mitigate against them in future. Our vision, therefore, is to map out these diseases and their relationships on a blockchain that will churn out real time data analytics to enhance decision making when it comes to mitigation against disease. Our incentives app and data capture process is just the backbone of the blockchain we have set out to build.
